It also means that the normal day to day operation of the business must have a lot of overhead to have that kind of redundancy though. Redundancy is never free.
This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period.
That's the hidden cost.
I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.
Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.
That sounds good, but who will pay for the extra costs of men being out of the workforce longer?
There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least.
It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.
But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.
Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.
Could it be that the reality is that women have a lot more stress under pregnancy and childbirth cuz they are actually the ones giving birth?
This would lead to a lot more time out of the workforce and probably reduced productivity whilst caring for an infant the first couple years.
What if we just removed all employment protections/protected groups/parental leave and replaced it with a universal basic income? This would solve our leave-inequality problem as you get the same UBI payment everywhere and the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
The point of striving for equal parental leave in this instance is to even up the playing field economically for men and women. If they both have a roughly equal probability of going on parental leave and the time they'd take is roughly equal, then it makes no sense for a business to avoid hiring women of child-bearing age over men of child-having age (obviously it isn't as cut at dry, but generally there is a range of normal ages for men to dad's as well). It would of course not be perfect, but it has a chance of working at least.
Now if don't want to solve these issues (maybe you don't believe this is a problem) or if you want to look into entirely different ways of solving them (like universal basic income), then okay that's interesting but it's kind of a separate discussion.
> the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
Random aside. Why do we care if they use it as a selling point? If we want to remove that option we could also just make it national law. (Here I assume you're referring to the US since many countries have these laws already.)
Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.
Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.